“I wish it were that simple, that I could have a guidepost, or model, or scale against which to measure each work...”
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 “I think you can write about the personal sublime and still be in the socio-political world. I'd like American poets to be more involved.”
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“I'm not subtle. The violent impulses in my fiction are pretty much laid out on the table. I crave the opportunity to let out in fiction some of the dark thoughts that are not as accessible in a regular conversation.”
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“...the greedy soul will eat up everything. It'll destroy a hundred universes for the sake of a little attention—the flutter of an eyelash.”
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“William Carlos Williams said that a successful poet is one who writes a successful poem. That's it—it's hard to keep going on that alone, but many have to.”
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“...people want established writers to notice them because they think it might be some kind of touch from a world they can then enter...”
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“All the original violence of the American project is still vibrating...in a big bang sort of way.... It makes sense that pattern would show up in my stories.”
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 “Stories make the chaos understandable by arranging it along a timeline. But linear narration is only one way to perceive reality.”
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“Some things you can only see what's wrong with them—... Or sometimes you go back and go, Wow, how did I do that? It looks like I have a brain!”
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“I came to writing...because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn't going away anytime soon.”
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“I love good sentences. I have a lust for a good sentence as a reader and a writer.”
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“I go with the story that needs to be told.... I don't worry about my stories having to represent a certain viewpoint, a certain belief, a certain anything.”
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“I'm just too used to getting below the surface of things. My narrative point of view is always deep, close inside the complexity of people's minds.”
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“Eventually, nonfiction began to wear out. I must have written every anecdote in my life at least once. I wrote that material to death.”
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“Poetry in our complex society connects us to lyrical tension that has everything to do with discovery and the act of becoming.”
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“Of course I'm interested in some kind of communication, a speaking and a listening, between the human and non-human. I think we really are restricted in our knowledge by being only human.”
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“I prefer the term ‘literary nonfiction.’ Creativity is such a strange thing, as though people would intentionally write uncreatively...”
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“I don't want to be one of those writers who gets wrapped up in tangled sheets.”
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“That's the thing about poetry with me. I can't get out of it. I know people who write from different perspectives, you know, who write persona poems, but I think the subtext to all poems--the really good ones--is that the author is the speaker.”
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“I feel there is a great deal of highly conventional thinking in almost every area of life that must be discarded in order for a writer to make something with integrity.”
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“You read between the lines and discover what the character and personality of another writer is, and say, 'I like that guy. He's human. He's on the same wavelength.'”
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“I had always wanted to be a writer, but by virtue of always wanting to be a writer I became very frightened of it because it meant so much to me.”
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“Writers are both incredibly arrogant and insecure, simultaneously, and those two things are so close, really.”
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“If you read lots of great poetry, you'll be a better person for it, though if you're a shit, you'll probably still be a shit. Albeit a well-read, or a more interesting one at literary soirees.”
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“I love not knowing things and that is at the heart of being a poet.”
“It's no accident that it's easier to write a curse poem than a praise poem. I mean a good curse poem.”
“I can't see the characters in the novel as without hope. Their situations are desperate, but writing about such characters fires me because they make me feel like my writing matters.”
“I’m interested in knowing the deepest secrets that connect human beings.”
